Is Linux ready for desktop? tl;dr – NO
itvision.altervista.org
itvision.altervista.org
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214 (368 comments)
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757785 (2 comments)
I have suspend/hibernate, great Gnome experience, no issues to run presentations or use public printers, really stable and very fast experience, and I did not configure any system aspect to make it work, just installed the distribution and that works out of box.
Well, I am very happy with Linux desktop. Just presenting a contra-example :)
I've been running Arch Linux for about 8 years, Slackware for several years before that. But I think it was Mandrake that I originally ran as my desktop - way back at the turn of the century (albeit not as my primary desktop)
My Linux experience hasn't been without it's problems. But I really hated the direction Microsoft took with XP and, back then, I couldn't afford a Mac. So Linux was more a case of "the lesser of 3 evils" - particularly since my previous favourite OS, BeOS, was pretty much dead by that point. But over the years I've come to appreciate and depend on the POSIX / Linux paradigm so much that I feel completely handicapped when presented with a Windows desktop.
Which brings me to the crux of the issues with any Windows desktop vs Linux desktop debates: the two paradigms are vastly different yet many of the "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" conclusions are derived from authors approaching Linux like a Windows clone and then wondering why things don't behave like they'd expect.
If you're buying something new, you should use Linux's 1% or whatever puny desktop market share to reward hardware vendors that support open source. If you're installing Linux on whatever's lying around, be prepared to spend some time tracking down strange bugs.
Basically with various forms of linux - Mandrake, Redhat and then Ubuntu for the past decade. Rule of thumb is to pick thinkpads (or business class laptops) and pick Intel hardware where possible.
With a 4.4 kernel, Everything seems to work more-or-less fine. There's one or two issues with the graphics stack (HiDPI display, Nvidia Card), but these have workable solutions.
Heck, my last laptop (Sony Vaio Z), more-or-less worked too.
I think you've just got to follow one rule: Intel, Intel, Intel.
For three weeks every system works. After six months every system breaks. Even Windows 10 and Mac OSX developed various strange bugs (or annoying idiosyncrasies) after few months of my use.
For example my Windows 10 now got stuck on some system upgrade and periodically informs me about that with fullscreen message box and sound gets stuck for fraction of a second from time to time when I watch movies and games I'm playing get stuck from time to time for few seconds when I'm running them from one SSD but not the other.
My Mac OSX gets stuck on accessing network share and refuses to continue until I restart finder, also prefers WiFi when cable connection is available despite wifi being lower on "set service order".
Haven't run Linux for last few years as a main system but I'd surely find some stuff that stopped working after few months or in some circumstances.
> Serious bugs which impede normal workflow can take years to be resolved. A lot of crucial hardware (e.g. GPUs, Wi-Fi cards) isn't properly supported.
> Both Linux 4.1.9/4.1.10, which are considered "stable" (moreover this kernel series is also LTS(!)), crash under any network load.
> Under Linux many devices and devices features are still poorly supported or not supported at all. Some hardware (e.g. Broadcom Wi-Fi adapters) cannot be used unless you already have a working Internet connection.
> you are constantly bombarded with changes you don't expect or don't want.
> Another show-stopping problem for LTS distros is that LTS kernels often do not support new hardware.
> Neither Adobe Flash, nor Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome use video decoding and output acceleration in Linux, thus youtube clips will drain your laptop battery a lot faster than e.g. in Windows. Adobe says they are fed up with video decoding acceleration bugs under Linux and refuse to re-add support for this feature
> Keyboard shortcuts handling for people using local keyboard layouts is broken
> Keyboard handling in X.org is broken by design - when you have a pop up or an open menu, global keyboard shortcuts/keybindings don't (GTK) work (QT).
> Too many things in Linux require manual configuration using text files: (...) USB 3G/LTE modems, (...) to name a few.
But for the desktop side, there is no excuse for not having your video, audio and networking sorted and polished to death. Improving your battery life or saving internet traffic while on cellular data is not "professional video/audio", it has become pretty much standard computer experience today.
Bluetooth, how it works, how to use it on Linux is also an Enigma. And that's been patchy on my Thinkpad, but I haven't had that much of a joyous experience using Bluetooth on any device.
In short: 'they' could all try harder.
As for WiFi, my experience with Apple devices is mostly positive, or definitely better than on any other platform. So WiFi is quite possible to get right.
Has Bluetooth been bettered? I was hoping V4 would iron out wrinks. Wireless applications that are simple to use could be really, really great. That's what I thought the initial promise of Bluetooth was. I have some simple wants, like file exchange, control a media player remotely etc. Send audio output to another device etc.
The last office I worked in, a colleague had a modern Apple laptop, and he had connection issues with the wireless router. It wouldn't connect. Lots of fudging about with it. A fix was falling back to a slower speed to get it to work. There are issues with most hardware and software.
The wireless issues/fixes suggested for my HP are pretty ridiculous, removing drivers, installing in a certain order, barring updates etc. Very technical.
I don't think I've ever owned a machine/OS that hasn't had some problem, including an old Apple.
Well, only the kernel IS actually Linux. A Linux-kernel based *nix OS in itself, which is usually wrongly assumed as Linux, is not in fact Linux (or not quite). In this regard Android is just like a lot of other Linux-kernel based distributions, no mater that it runs on an older/modified kernel.
In fact, using Windows 8.1 or 10 I can't get 1080p video over HDMI without screen tearing.
With Ubuntu, I can.
I have a server without a monitor I'd like to VNC to. Unfortunately X doesn't start without a physical monitor plugged in because it uses it for autodetection. It's such a silly problem that you can even buy fake "monitor" dongles to plug in to trick X into thinking that there is one.
I don't feel like spending money on a software problem so I followed the standard workaround - create a static xorg.conf file. This is very suboptimal because what happens if I later plug in a real monitor?
Ok so now X starts. Sort of. Actually lightdm starts and I still can't get X11vnc to connect to the `:0` display. Apparently there is a workaround involving the MIT magic cookie but at this point I've given up.
In fact does X even support monitor hot-plugging?
Oh and also, if the wifi connection goes down and X isn't running it doesn't automatically reconnect! Wtf? I assume this is because the thing that does the reconnecting is a GUI tool of some sort.
Madness.
Using x11vnc to connect to a VNC server is like SSHing into localhost instead of just opening up a terminal. You're approaching the task the wrong way around.
Wifi not reconnecting sounds like your system has a graphical widget handling the network connections. No X = no graphical programs = no network connections.
But arguments about VNC aside, the vast majority of the time you don't want nor need a GUI running on a server to begin with. Aside maybe some game servers, any Linux server daemon is command line configurable so you're better off saving your RAM and managing your server via SSH (or better yet, Vagrant / Puppet / equivalent)
In my experience, Linux is actually very good on servers. But by this I mean "proper" servers. Personally I'd still rather run FreeBSD, but many of the same arguments for and against Linux are applicable for FreeBSD as well.
And who says I don't want to run a GUI? I don't live in the 70s.
That’s your problem right there. You can’t (or, rather, don’t) “VNC” to Unix servers. For normal remote access, you use SSH. If you really need to run a graphical X program continuously on a server, you run a virtual X server program like “Xvfb”, and point your graphical X program to that. You can then “VNC” all you like to this virtual X server. All without a monitor or even a graphics card or a mouse on the actual server.
This thinking – the idea that a server has something one can refer to as “the” screen, or “the” mouse – is completely and utterly wrong, and betrays a thinking born from Microsoft Windows and other desktop-only-oriented operating systems.
I don't disagree with your point per se but the reality is a little more nuanced that you suggest. For example, UNIX provided green screens to null terminals long before Windows Server was a thing. And mouse enabled Linux / UNIX terminal tools (eg elinks or aptitude) support mouse input even over SSH.
Though I do appreciate you were referring to "monitors" specifically when you discussed "screens", it's still worth noting that the old thin client model of computing has come back into trend again with Windows desktops available in the cloud (typically aimed at organisations that want a managed deployment of workstations - akin to a hosted Windows Terminal Services).
So it really depends on your workloads and what your definition of "screens" are :)
[1] https://etrading.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/windows-containers...
IIRC starting with server 2012 or 2012 R2, all configuration and management functionality was exposed via powershell commandlets, as Server Core was the default installation type and server management was meant to be done via winRM/remote powershell sessions.
I guess the software you mention that depends on having a desktop will do some combination of not working and working poorly, but they aren't targeting legacy applications with it, they are fleshing out their cloud offering.
This is a clear flaw in Linux/X - don't try to excuse it with the tired old "why would you want to do that?" refrain.
Yes, it does. It's called XRandR.
Not sure how your desktop system handles it, is there a pretty graphical widget or how you configure it, I don't use a desktop GUI, I set it up with the xrandr command line tool (which is more easily repeatable than a GUI, albeit less discoverable).
> I assume this is because the thing that does the reconnecting is a GUI tool of some sort.
You're probably using network-manager, which is a graphical widget in Gnome (KDE has something similar). There are other methods of setting up Wifi (I use wifi-menu on Arch Linux).
It was discussed a few days ago with a lots of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214